Revision as of 21:33, 8 July 2010

Contents

Quoth the forums:

UPDATE! Was kinda suspicious of the Indigo2 results before, so I checked... damn meter thingy was indeed showing VA instead of Watts (japes was right). Thus, I've corrected all the results with a .62 scaling, so assume these are estimates for the moment (.62 power factor should be ok for Indy, Indigo2, Octane, but not sure about Fuel and newer systems). When I can I'll retest the various configs...

Power Consumption Table for Various SGIs, in Watts (tested with a UK supply 240V AC nominal). 'Standby' usage is when the system is off, but the power cable is still live and plugged in, ie. wasted power. Use a plug with a switch on it, or switch off at the wall or extension! In the system descriptions, the number in brackets after RAM is the number of banks used. Description format is: name, CPU(s), gfx, RAM, disks, extras, note refs. The table is ordered by the unit using the least power listed first. A system described as 'Octane2' has the later Cherokee PSU, while an 'Octane' has the older Lucent PSU.

Standby Power Usage (power off but live cable still connected)

EXTRA NOTES:

1. On O2, if the resolution is reduced from 1280x1024 to 640x480, the power consumption drops by 0.01A. :D

In case anyone's ever wondered, I did a quick check on the typical power consumption of a fairly ordinary Octane2 (400/V6, 4 x 256MB DIMMs, 36GB 10K disk).

When idle, the current draw is 0.97A @ 240V (UK), so the power consumption is a little under 240W, or about 1 "unit" every 4 hours (1kWh = 1kW drawn for 1 hour, about 11p in the UK just now, or 22c US).

Hammering the system with lots of apps doing things all at the same time, the current draw peaks around 1.03A, with 1.01A on average, so not much change.

Thus, assuming a typical total use of 8 hours a day (I would hope sensible people will turn off their system during lunch), the running cost is about 24p/day, or approx. 30 UKP per quarter.

Interesting though that the current draw is so low for a system like this, compared to what the PSU is rated at.

Quoth the forums:

A lot of people have recently been asking about (or at least implied a concern about) the power usage of their sgi systems.

I borrowed a friend's current clamp meter last weekend and measured the power usage for my two big SGI systems. Here are the results, in case anyone's interested. I'm also hoping to solicit other folks' experiences here -- hopefully the result may lead to a comprehensive wiki page on actual power usage by system and possibly component as well. I realize there are a lot of variables, but hopefully over time (and with a bit of crowd-sourcing) we can establish a fairly complete data set. If nothing else, it may at least be amusing for posterity.

I have the Onyx2 hooked up to my water heater circuit, which provides 244V in opposing phases, so the current was measured (and found equal) on both hot wires: